


The Heartwarming Saga of Barry Allen and the Fuzzy-Faced Rogues

by chocolatecatcupcakecheese



Series: The Flash Catverse!AU [1]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: All this because I thought for two seconds that Leonard Snart is rather self-satisfied like a cat, Alternate Universe - Cats, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Crack, Happy Ending, Magic - Freeform, Other, because i am trash, but I wrote it anyway, pure and unadulterated, the au no one wanted
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-15
Updated: 2015-06-15
Packaged: 2018-04-04 13:51:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4140147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chocolatecatcupcakecheese/pseuds/chocolatecatcupcakecheese
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The AU where The Rogues are cats, and Barry Allen their owner.<br/>Part One of the two-part series all about cats, science fiction shows, spoons, freezers, soft things, wibbly magic, and Happy Endings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Heartwarming Saga of Barry Allen and the Fuzzy-Faced Rogues

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Cats Have Staff](https://archiveofourown.org/works/342003) by [Lys ap Adin (lysapadin)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lysapadin/pseuds/Lys%20ap%20Adin). 
  * Inspired by [Phil Coulson is not a crazy cat lady](https://archiveofourown.org/works/720149) by [nyargles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nyargles/pseuds/nyargles). 



> Allergies have had me down, but at long last, the Catverse!AU part one, part the first is here! Much thanks to [coldflashtrash](http://tmblr.co/myurQz9nO-_nozla1efe5rQ) on tumblr for just... existing. It's very encouraging to know that people care about the ships you're writing.  
> Enjoy!

Barry’s morning routine is always at least fifty percent fuzzy faces these days.

He heard one of his friends talk about her morning routine once, Caitlin mentioning how Ronnie was always underfoot, sticking his whiskers into whatever she was doing, putting his fur on everything. At the time, Barry had laughed.

Now he’s wakened by Lisa’s yowling, and he just tiredly pushes two furry bodies off of his chest so he can see the time on the alarm clock. He’s overslept. Crap. He jumps out of bed, pulling little Mick out with him and depositing him on top of the covers with the other two. Mick swipes at his hand and growls, crawls back into the warm hollow in the bedclothes. Barry sighs, and as he trips into the bathroom, pulling his pajamas off as he goes in a (probably futile) time-saving effort, there’s a cold spot on his side where Mick was leeching heat in the night.

He goes to the toilet, nudging Lisa away with his foot. “Shoo!” he says, makes a hissing sound for good measure. Never again the horror and the injury to his testicles.

He washes his hands, elbowing Len away from the water and soap, reaching around him with a sigh when the fluffy monster dodges and insinuates himself against Barry’s chest anyway.

He trips over two cats on the way to the ancient toaster oven, starts it on defrosting french toast sticks, shoos Len away from the freezer and Mick away from the toaster, trips over three cats on the way back.

He sings ‘Manic Monday’ and takes the fastest shower known to man, then gets out to find all three cats sitting primly, staring at him. “Oh, shit, you guys, I forgot to feed you!” He dries himself hurriedly, only tripping over the towel once, then dresses in something that smells clean and probably doesn’t clash horribly. He runs back into the kitchen, tripping over one cat and pirouetting around the other two, and grabs a can from the stash of sardines and a clean plate.

“Here you go, you little rogues, you,” he smiles, watching them swarm the plate for a moment, listening to the purring and ‘nyak-nyak’ munching-sounds of happy fuzzy piranhas. Then he remembers the time constraint and grabs the French toast sticks out of the oven, drizzles them in syrup. He eats standing over the sink, rinses the plate afterward and places it with all its fellows, which seem to be oozing slime? Dishes, he notes, another item for the to-do list.

He runs a hand over each of the cats, grabs a sweater, his bag, his keys, and his phone and leaps out the door, dashing down the stairs and out into the street. 

He turns on his phone as he runs, checking for missed messages. He stops when he realizes that not only does he have none, but the phone marks today as Saturday.

Oops.

He turns around and starts the awkward trek back to his brownstone, where he’ll do the dishes. Len’s fuzzy face and resounding purr greets him at the door.

* * *

The first cat arrives in mid-October. Barry comes home from the shittiest day at work, only to find a white cat curled up against his door on the stoop, soaked to the skin with the torrential rains. He goes inside, tries to harden his heart to the plights of small animals, turns on the television to see what’s on. He lasts maybe two minutes before he’s back out there, murmuring his apologies to the bedraggled lump in a wavery voice with tears in his eyes. He picks it up, tucks it tenderly inside his coat, and carries it inside. The cat takes one look around his apartment and immediately scratches him and runs away. He follows at a distance with towel and cell phone in hand, waiting to catch it again and dry it off, then call the shelter to pick it up. Barry watches it sniff around and explore for a while, flicking its feet every few steps, stopping at corners to lick its fur. It finally settles on the sofa in the living room. It wraps its tail around itself and tucks all its feet under its body and purrs so loudly he can hear it across the room. Barry’s resolve shrivels up. He can’t, he just can’t. Barry puts his cell phone down. This cat is so cute, he can't just send it to the shelter where they'll put it in a cage and leave it and someone might not adopt it, or worse, where it'll get adopted by someone really horrible, like the little girl from “Finding Nemo”. Barry sighs. He’s been considering getting pet or a while, ever since Iris got together with Eddie in July, but isn’t sure about adding the responsibilities involved with his plate. Taking care of a cat until its owner is found will be a good test of whether or not he can handle it, he supposes. Barry adds ‘put up fliers’ to his to-do list, then takes the towel over to make his new roommate comfortable.

He takes care of it, feeding it SPAM and bits of his hamburgers and lunchmeat until he gets supplies. He reads up on cat-care, acquires toys and dishes and a litter tray and scoop. He learns the cat is a boy at the expense of a pint of blood and three bandaids, and learns the cat will not accept anything but people food at the expense of eleven wasted cans of cat food, four bags of kibble, three bags of cat treats, and a broken vase. He sweeps up the vase and gives the unwanted food to Caitlin.

When three weeks pass and no one calls to claim the cat, he gives in and takes the posters down. The cat has at this point made himself _very much_ at home, his favorite resting spot being _right in the middle_ of Barry’s Leonard Nimoy shrine. Barry tries moving the photo, autograph, Zombies of the Stratosphere poster and assorted Star Trek paraphernalia to a higher shelf on the bookcase, but then the cat takes one look at the clean space intended _just for him_ and spreads out on the coffee table instead, knocking all of Barry’s precious science journals in the floor. So Barry smooths out the myriad of bent pages and moves the shrine back into its former place, now leaving a cat-sized space in the middle. The cat immediately jumps up there, where he purrs for half an hour. Barry tries moving the shrine again, to much the same destructive result. The manga and his classic comic collection may never recover. He moves the shrine back to its proper place and resigns himself to just dusting the space extra well. The cat insists on sitting in Leonard Nimoy’s spot, so he names the cat Leonard, or Len for short. 

Barry becomes accustomed to a small, compact weight on his chest in bed at night. He incorporates sardine-dishing into his morning routine. All his worldly possessions acquire a thin layer of lovingly-deposited, long white fur. Len becomes a regular fixture on Barry’s movie nights, settling on the back of the sofa to the immediate left of his ear (the only other acceptable resting place for his fat fuzzy face aside from Barry’s chest at night and the shrine). After a grueling day at the precinct, Barry sits down, turns on some old sci-fi movie or superhero cartoon, maybe reruns of Dragon Ball or Star Trek, and talks quietly to the small, oddly comforting presence on his left. He tells Len all about the superiority of the original series over Next Generation or (God forbid) Voyager, points out the references to Classic Who villains and episodes made in New Who, and nitpicks all the places where superhero cartoons follow the comic book canon and all the places they butcher it. (Especially all the places they butcher it.) He talks to Len about all the superheroes’ supervillains, sometimes waxing poetic late into the night. Len is a good listener, after all, and for all that he is a cat, it sometimes seems like he understands what Barry is saying.

“No, but really, the villains have all the fun! I can admire the honesty. They make no compunctions about what they’re doing, whether revenge or world domination or just causing anarchy. And some aren’t outright evil, either. Villains, a lot of them, are just misguided or doing selfish things, because their lives were shit and they’re just trying to get by in the way they know, right?”

Len meows, licks a paw and swipes it over his ear.

Barry grins. “See, you get it. And even while they’re, like, robbing banks or making killer technology to defeat their hero nemeses, the best villains have honor, right? They have lines they won’t cross and codes of honor and they’re _people!”_

Len switches paws and swipes over his other ear, opens one eye to fix on Barry. He starts purring.

“I especially love comic book characters so much because they’re all so _human!_ Not everything goes right and shit happens and they have bad childhoods like regular people. But I prefer the villains over the heroes because the villains are all so corny. Especially the classic comics, like sixties-seventies-era! They’re all so cheerfully morally bankrupt and making bad puns and even after the heroes hand them their butts on a silver platter each issue, they still come back and try again. You’ve really gotta admire the perseverance and the confidence required to be so cheesy and wear a spandex suit to confront the guy who thwarted all your plans last week, right?”

Len stops licking, makes a ‘mrrf’ sound, and streeeeetches, touching his paws to Barry’s shoulder and flexing his claws.

Barry grins and reaches to scratch Len behind the ears. Len dodges his hand and moves to sit on the sofa-back right behind Barry’s head, reaching two paws up to bat at Barry’s hair. “I think the movies do a good job of portraying all of the characters on all sides as very real and relatable. And the battle scenes? Man. I really wanna see the next movie in the theatre.” 

Len suddenly wraps himself around Barry’s head. The little ‘nyak-nyak’ noises indicate he’s licking Barry’s hair. The commercial break is over and the big battle between The Doctor and the Master is back on. “Look, Len, you’ll notice here in a sec that we don’t actually see the Master dying! He could still be alive! We never actually see what happens because it cuts to the planet blowing up.” 

Len growls and lets his claws come out just enough to be pinpricks of sharp pressure against Barry’s scalp. “Sorry.” Barry mimes zipping his lips and reaches up to scratch Len’s right ear. Len purrs and retracts his claws. Barry thinks his cat is probably the strangest creature ever, then has a brief silent freak out because he just thought of Len as his. There’s no getting rid of him now, he’s started thinking of the cat as his, Len is now a permanent part of the household, he _done named 'im_. Barry sighs and stares outside at the torrential November rains. Better stock up on sardines. Len stops purring, and Barry refocuses his attention on the television where ‘The End of Time’ is nearly over. Wilfred is knocking on the glass control room door. 

* * *

The other two cats arrive in early December. One Sunday morning, Len suddenly goes crazy, racing up and down and all around the living room, nearly knocking the television off the stand in the middle of a Star Trek rerun, finally stopping at the front door. There he sits on his haunches and yowls until Barry pauses the television and opens the door— revealing two other cats, a battered, tatted-eared black cat and a sleek, shiny calico. Len leans up and places his paws as far up in the glass storm door as he can, then slides down with his claws out, making a horrid screeching sound. He repeats the motion, never stopping his yowling all the while.

“I’m not letting you out to fight with them, Len. Scooch, boy, I’m closing the door.”

Len yowls again, pitiful this time, looks up at Barry and retracts his claws mid-screech. He paws at the door. The calico steps up to the other side of the door and presses her nose against it. Len mirrors her (male calicoes were a genetic anomaly, he’d read somewhere, calico was almost surely female) and they both start purring, so loud he could hear them both from three feet away. Barry sighs, grabs a flyswatter in case he needs to break up a fight, and opens the door. Len makes to step out, but the two visitor cats jump over him, right into his apartment.

“Leon- _ard!_ Damnit, cat! You can’t just invite your friends into my house,” Barry hisses, holding the door open wider, letting snow in in the doormat. “Shoo!” He motions emphatically out the door.

None of the cats pay him any mind. Len is cleaning the calico’s ears and she is doing her best to reach his in return. The black cat, sitting on the other side of Len, leans down and starts licking Len’s tail. Len curls his tail around the black cat’s face and the black cat bites Len’s tail. Len yowls. Barry braces to reach into the fray, possibly lose blood, and pull apart a fight as Len rears around and pounces on the black cat. But Len simply holds down the growling cat and licks its ears. After a few seconds of this treatment, the black cat grumbles and starts purring instead, then rolls on its side, boneless. Huh. A boy cat. Len drapes himself over the black cat, apparently satisfied, and the calico curls up next to them both, purring. 

Barry sighs as they all settle in, right on his acorn-patterned rug in the middle of the foyer. This seems for all the world like some kind of touching family reunion in a Lifetime movie. Maybe they’re his estranged cat family! Barry’s heart does a flip-flop and then contracts in his chest. He feels tears pricking at the corner of his eyes and stifles the gooey crooning sounds he wants to make at the thought. These are the same kind of feels he gets from a Lifetime movie. It must be so. Whether they’re actually Len’s family (they certainly _seem_ like they know each other) or he’s confusing his hobbies and the fandom with reality again doesn’t matter. Barry doesn’t have the heart to break them apart and put the two significantly skinnier newcomers out into the street again.

Barry sighs again and resigns himself to the fact that he now lives with three cats. He makes a note to stock up on sardines again.


End file.
